“happiness is an incredibly rare and dangerous emotion. i’m someone who can’t bear the fall from happiness to despair. i need a safety net to prepare for it since the higher i climb, the greater my injuries will be when i fall.”

god damn there’s some incredible lines and passages in this book. i wasn’t expecting the commentary and exploration on body autonomy, gender, and mental health so i’m connecting to this quite a bit! i’m loving the way it’s written as well🙂‍↕️

As an autistic non-binary person, the speech about humans needing to assign someone a gender before they can even begin to interact with that person was so funny. I never understood that need and have never felt it myself, so it's always been such a strange phenomenon to me. The social script totally crumbles when someone's gender presentation is not easy to label and it has caused so many borderline comical situations in my life. (It can of course also cause very unsafe situations, but I'm going to stick to the tone of the alien's speech and focus on the funny side)

For a human perspective on what the alien is talking about, when I used to present more androginously and lived in Japan, there were so many instances where people thought I was a man and would stop me when I was trying to enter a public toilet, or would call me sir, or straight up not know how to address me. At the time, it was a very freeing feeling to be able to pass as male, and when it still happens today occasionally I just find it funny (I am very fortunate to live in a country where it's mostly safe to present in a gender non-conforming way in public), but the alien's reflections made me think of how truly distressing and confusing it can be for the person who is trying to determine what I am so that they can address me in the "right" way, which isn't a perspective I had given much thought to.

Do you feel this "need to know" when you are interacting with someone? Have you found yourself in similar comical situations?